Adolfo Lopez Mateos

Adolfo Lopez Mateos (26 May 1909-22 September 1969) was President of Mexico from 1 December 1958 to 30 November 1964, succeeding Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and preceding Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. He was affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Biography
Adolfo Lopez Mateos was born in Atizapan de Zaragoza, Mexico on 26 May 1909, and he became a university lecturer and entered politics in 1946. He became secretary-general of Mexico's major party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and was a successful Minister of Labor under President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines from 1952 to 1958. Despite his pro-labor reputation, as President he broke the militant railworkers' strike of 1959, but afterwards he introduced a general profit-sharing plan for Mexican workers. He carried out a land reform whose extent was second only to that of Lazaro Cardenas, as 30,000,000 acres of land were redistributed to landless peasants. A low rate of inflation and a stable exchange rate were maintained, which attracted foreign investment. In foreign affairs, he finally settled a long-running border dispute south of El Paso with the United States, and maintained a foreign policy of conscious independence from the USA, refusing to break diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba. The first left-wing politician to hold the presidency since Cardenas, he left office in 1964 and died in 1969.